How Failure Can Help You Become a Better Coach

Failure is a rather subjective experience to define. But one thing is true – we’ve all had our own taste of failure. Whether it was running a business that didn’t make enough money to sustain itself or experiencing the heartbreaking demise of a love relationship. Your own personal tragedies and failures serve to equip you with the ability to guide your clients through profound transformation and in fact help you to become a better coach.

In my previous life as a Dating coach, I drew on my “failures” in the relationship arena to both empathize with and to provide guidance to clients who were experiencing the same frustration I had experienced in the search for a partner.

Should you become a Business coach if you’ve never had to pull yourself out of a client drought? If everything has always been on the up and up, how will you ever understand how to hold your client’s hand through some of the most difficult parts of his or her journey? After all, that’s one of the main reasons you’ve been hired. You are the trusted guide that has walked the path, fallen down and gotten back up as many times as necessary to now be standing where your client would one day like to stand.

Your own Hero’s Journey is literary the reason your clients want to be guided by you and without your failures, how will you be able to guide them empathetically to the end result they desire? You’ll undoubtedly be a better guide if you’re doing so from the vantage point of having overcome the same challenges that your coaching clients are looking for guidance in overcoming. From here, you’re able to fuel their determination to push through resistance and come out on the other side.

You can certainly become a better, more empathetic coach as you draw on your own failures – they will make your client’s experiences and challenges undoubtedly more palpable to you and in turn you’ll be in a better position to guide them to their desired result.